For Those About to Fail, We Salute You!

In January this year I reported that the ERC had been inundated by applications to its Synergy scheme. The following month it published its Guide for Peer Reviewers, and I've been meaning to write about this for some time - two months in fact. It makes for some interesting reading, and brings home how hard it will be for the ERC to cut 710 applications down to 10-15 awards.

Although the ERC states that there will be a 'two-step peer review evaluation', the process will be more complicated than that. Here it is, step by step.

1. Pre-selection. The chairs of the five peer review panels will cull the number of proposals to a more manageable number. The Guide suggests '7 times the indicative budget'. Assuming that the majority of applicants have put in the maximum allowable (€15m - and, if you're going to go for it, you may as well go for it), that means that this will cut out 90% of the applications. That's quite a cut.
2. Panel. With what's left (c70-105 applications) the panel members will review them and gather to discuss them. They will whittle the applications down to '2.5 times the indicative call budget'. So that's another two thirds gone.
3. New Panel. The original panel will now be exhausted, and will be discarded like empty husks. A new set of panellists will be selected. They will convene and cut the applications to '2 times the indicative budget' - i.e. 20-30 applications. 
4. Interview. Anyone left standing will be invited to interview, and there might be site visits as well.

Blimey. The Apprentice and The X Factor have nothing on this. Perhaps the ERC can generate a little extra income by selling the television rights? And introduce a fifth round that's something like The Hunger Games? I can see it now, with each candidate being paraded around Brussels in chariots prior to the final round.

Better still, perhaps Joachim Phoenix can play the panel chair, and Russell 'Group' Crowe a jobbing prof going for the Synergy grant that will release him from the treadmill of the application process.

If there are any Hollywood producers reading this, give me a call. I tell you, there are plenty more ideas where that came from.

ERC Inundated by Applications for Synergy Grants

Interesting statistics have emerged from the European Research Council regarding the number of applications to the pilot round of the Synergy grants scheme. You will, of course, remember that this was launched in July to encourage academics to group together to be more than the sum of their parts. Like the Beatles. I mean, aside from the Frog Chorus, has Paul McCartney ever done anything that touches his work with John Lennon?

Anyway, as it was a pilot, they were only planning to fund 10 or so grants. However, they obviously touched a raw nerve of need amongst the European research community, because by close of play on 25 January they had received 710 applications. Now I'm no mathematician, but I make that to be a success rate of 1.41%. Eeek!

This brings back the heady days of the first round of the Starting Grants in 2007, when 9167 applicants applied for one of the 299 awards on offer. But even that offered a comparatively respectable 3.26% success rate - more than double the possible outcome for the Synergy Grants.

I'd love to know what's going through the mind of the ERC President Prof Helga Nowotny (whose surname, incidentally, looks a little like a mashup between the acronyms for the News of the World and Have I Got News for You). Panic? Fear? Or pleasure that, once again, the ERC has identified they type of funding that European researchers actually want: responsive mode, and generous.

I hope so. I hope that this experience does not deter the ERC from ever running the scheme again. Rather, I hope they bite the bullet and provide more funding for the scheme. There's obviously a pan-European appetite for such funding. Let's hope they're brave, recognise the demand, and provide the funding to at least push the success rate into double figures.

ERC Launches New 'Synergy' Scheme

At the UKRO Conference yesterday the EC’s Ben Turner gave some more detail of the European Research Council’s (ERC) new scheme, ‘Synergy’, which will be launched shortly with the new Work Programme in July. The Council already runs three schemes:

• Starting Grants: offering €2m over 5 years
• Advanced Grants: offering €3.5m over 5 years
• Proof of Concept: which provides existing award holders with funding to explore the commercial viability of the products of their research.

These – and in particular the first two – had proved to be very successful. The first round of the Starting and Advanced grants had been heavily oversubscribed, and the resulting success rate was around 4%. Since then it had risen to around 15%.However, whilst the budget had increased so had the number of applications; Starting Grants had risen by 42% for the last call. This is still a tough funder.

The Synergy Grant will be piloted in 2011-12. It will be allocated €150m so, whilst smaller than the Starting Grants (€730m) and Advanced Grants (€680m), it will be larger than FET. The intention of the new scheme is to provide funding for new collaborations. It will fund small groups of investigators (2-4) who can make the case that together they can achieve more than they can individually. They will fund 10-12 projects initially. The scheme is very open: the ERC has avoided being at all prescriptive. It’s been debating the new instrument for around two years, and intially toyed with the idea of restricting it to interdisciplinary projects, or cooperation with colleagues outside the EU. In the end it kept it simple. Almost nothing has been ruled out. There is an ‘expectation’ that it will be interdisciplinary, and that the investigators will be physically in the same place. But this is an expectation, not a requirement.